France's Bizarre Three-Wheeled Buggies May Be the Perfect EVs

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France's Bizarre Three-Wheeled Buggies May Be the Perfect EVs

Toyota's i-Road may be the perfect urban electric vehicle.

Toyota

The streets of one French city will soon be filled with funky vehicles that resemble hulked-up mopeds. But before you make fun, consider that while they look silly, the way these things are being used may make them the perfect electric vehicles.

Next month, Toyota and Grenoble will launch a program giving residents access to two of the weirder vehicles built in recent memory. Through the Cité Lib by Ha:Mo (harmonious mobility) system, Toyota is providing 70 EVs that can be rented for short periods of time. Like bike sharing, the idea is to give people a way to get from public transit stations to their destinations, covering the “last mile” so they don’t feel the need to take their car.

The goal is to “be a part of creating a future urban mobility,” says Toyota chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada, to make getting around cities easier and reduce emissions. We’ll have to see how the Grenoblois react to the program to gauge its success, but it’s got two things going for it. The very fact that it’s a new kind of vehicle sharing service makes it worth trying out. And more importantly, Toyota has found what may be the ideal application of electric vehicles.

Anyone 18 and older with a driver’s license can sign up for the program, which uses two kinds of Toyota vehicles: the three-wheeled i-Road, which seats one, and the four-wheeled COMS, with room for two. Fees vary, but expect to pay about €3 ($3.89) for 15 minutes, or €5 ($6.50) for half an hour. Users can park at any of 27 stations around the city, where they plug in to charge before walking away.

The new program calls to mind two kinds of vehicle sharing services. The first is car sharing. A good example is Car2Go, a Daimler AG-run company that lets users in cities in Germany and the US rent Smart cars by the minute. Users can park wherever they find a space, not at set stations, which fully solves the last mile problem.

The second is bike sharing. More than 500 cities around the world have a program, and while the specifics vary, the basic premise is usually the same: Sign up for a membership, and you can borrow a bike from any station in the city, ride it for a set amount of time (usually around 30 minutes), then return it to any station where there’s an open spot. Bikes are even better than electric cars when it comes to the environment and public health, and you can pack many more bikes into a standard bike share than you get vehicles in a car share. Of course, biking is less convenient when you’re lugging around groceries or offspring. Or when you remember that humans invented automobiles because sometimes being lazy is totally fine.

The Toyota-Grenoble program is a blend of these services. The vehicles are better than Smart cars for moving around a cramped old city like Grenoble (maneuverability is an undervalued part of mobility), though you can’t just park them wherever. Using electricity instead of gasoline is good for the environment and lungs of le peuple, but not as good as making everyone pedal. In any case, these are early days for vehicle sharing services, and we don’t know what exact combination of pros and cons people want. The very fact that Ha:Mo is a new system makes it worth trying.

Toyota

But beyond that, there’s a reason we’re excited about this system: It may be the perfect application of electric vehicles. The two big downsides to the technology today are limited range and high cost. Apart from Tesla, whose vehicles can actually cross the country, automakers pitch electric cars as city vehicles with enough juice to handle most daily driving tasks. The problem is that prices are still real high, and few people are willing to pay $30,000 or more for a vehicle that’s useless when they need to hit the road for a few hours to see the in-laws. Until range goes up and prices come down, mass adoption of EVs won’t happen.

Ha:Mo solves neither problem, but sidesteps both. On a full battery, the i-Road and COMS can each drive about three hours at a presumably limited speed. That’s actually excessive for vehicles meant to be used for a few minutes at a time and charged in between. Cost isn’t an issue because people are renting the vehicles (at a reasonable rate), not buying or leasing them. EV ownership may not happen on a grand scale for years or decades. In the meantime, these vehicles fill the niche that is open to them.

One potential weakness of the Ha-Mo program is its network of just 27 parking/charging stations. The fact that the cars must be parked there limits their usefulness. Surely some residents will be too far from stations to make the vehicles worth renting.

Toyota could take a lesson here from Car2Go San Diego, one of the cities where the program uses electric instead of gas-powered cars. There, users can park wherever they want, unless the car’s battery drops below 20 percent of its range while they’re driving. In that case, they must end their journey at one of the stations around the city where they can plug in. If Ha:Mo follows suit or finds another way to solves that issue, it could finally make mass EV adoption—if not ownership—a reality.